The AP's Brian Bergstein has a recent story on the e-discovery field: E-Discovery Is Big Business. "With so much work done via e-mail, instant messaging and other online platforms, 'nothing's in the file cabinets anymore,'" he writes, quoting Michele Lange, staff attorney for legal technologies at Kroll Ontrack. It's an interesting article and a good overview of the explosive growth happening in the e-discovery arena. What struck me about the article though was the fact it didn't mention Web 2.0 companies and services — also experiencing explosive growth and uptake. Ms Lange is of course correct that nothing is in file cabinets anymore, but increasingly — with employees using Web mail, blogs, wikis, online news aggregators, social bookmarking, and other hosted means of communication and knowledge management for business purposes (which might violate a technology use policy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen) — material of great relevance to a legal dispute might not be anywhere under a litigant's direct control.

I hear the wheels turning in the heads of our trial court litigator readers: what I'm describing has some competing aspects. On the one hand, it lets a party respond to a discovery request by saying, gee, we'd be happy to give you that but we just don't have it. On the other, someone, a third party, does have it, and things that might ordinarily be known about and subjected to a document (non)retention policy can and probably will persist in that third party's database.

The article talks about companies employing e-discovery firms proactively, so as not to have to scramble or be caught unawares when the inevitable discovery requests roll in. (Included factoid: "The average company bigger than $1 billion is wrestling with 147 lawsuits.") In this vein, it concludes with Gerald Massey of Fios speculating, "The names we'll associate with the services we provide in three, four, five years from now will be like IBM and EMC and Oracle." I think that's right, but I wonder too if (and doubt whether) many Web 2.0 companies have tried to factor responding to third party discovery into their cost of doing business. By definition, they are bound to be subjected to the expense and inconvenience of more subpoenas duces tecum than would otherwise be the case.

Related, via Genie Tyburski: Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and Librarian 2.0: Preparing for the 2.0 World.

Also related: part 1 and part 2 of my recent appearance on The M Show, where I discuss the procedural, third party discovery aspects of the government's COPA-related subpenas to search companies.